From the newest NSA documents from Snowdon via UK Guardian”
Among other things, the program is designed to “insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems”. These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as “adversaries“.
So you shop online and use the website’s encryption, or you are sending private or business email or files, that must be kept private from identity theft or corporate spying or just plain thieves, YOU are the adversary because YOU encrypted your files. Anyone who encrypts their files is the adversary. From Dictionary.com:
Adversary
noun
1. a person, group, or force that opposes or attacks; opponent; enemy; foe.2. a person, group, etc., that is an opponent in a contest; contestant.
The documents show that the agency has already achieved another of the goals laid out in the budget request: to influence the international standards upon which encryption systems rely.
Independent security experts have long suspected that the NSA has been introducing weaknesses into security standards, a fact confirmed for the first time by another secret document. It shows the agency worked covertly to get its own version of a draft security standard issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology approved for worldwide use in 2006.
“Eventually, NSA became the sole editor,” the document states.
The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back.
This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.
And by we, I mean the engineering community.
Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.
But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can – and should – do.
One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don’t cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.
We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I’ve just started collecting. I want 50. There’s safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.
Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.
We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems – these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.
John C. Dvorak on NSA Spying: Are Americans Now the Enemy?
The turkey jerks who are writing and voting for these laws (secret and not secret) need to be voted out of office. A clean sweep so to speak.
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